Neither can you make good grenadiers of a poor Darian or an Albino. It
is not because they have partridge eyes, or that their hair and eyebrows
are like the finest and whitest silk; but it is because their bodies,
and consequently their courage, partake of the most extreme weakness.
There is none but a blind man, and even an obstinate blind man, who can
deny the existence of all these different species. It is as great and
remarkable as that of apes.
That All Races Of Men Have Constantly Lived In Society.
All the men whom we have discovered in the most uncultivated and
frightful countries herd together like beavers, ants, bees, and several
other species of animals.
We have never seen countries in which they lived separate; or in which
the male only joined with the female by chance, and abandoned her the
moment after in disgust; or in which the mother estranged herself from
her children, after having brought them up; or in which human beings
lived without family and society. Some poor jesters have abused their
understandings so far as to hazard the astonishing paradox, that man is
originally created to live alone, and that it is society which has
depraved his nature. They might as well say that herrings were created
to swim alone in the sea; and that it is by an excess of corruption,
that they pass in a troop from the Frozen Ocean to our shores; that
formerly cranes flew in the air singly, and that, by a violation of
their natural instinct, they have subsequently chosen to travel in
company.
Every animal has its instinct, and the instinct of man, fortified by
reason, disposes him towards society, as towards eating and drinking. So
far from the want of society having degraded man, it is estrangement
from society which degrades him. Whoever lived absolutely alone, would
soon lose the faculty of thinking and expressing himself; he would be a
burden to himself, and it would only remain to metamorphose him into a
beast. An excess of powerless pride, which rises up against the pride of
others, may induce a melancholy man to fly from his fellows; but it is a
species of depravity, and punishes itself. That pride is its own
punishment, which frets itself into solitude and secretly resents being
despised and forgotten. It is enduring the most horrible slavery, in
order to be free.
We have enlarged the bounds of ordinary folly so far as to say that it
is not natural for a man to be attached to a woman during the nine
months of her pregnancy. The appetite is satisfied, says the author of
these paradoxes; the man has no longer any want of woman, nor the woman
of man; and the latter need not have the least care, nor perhaps the
least idea of the effects of the transient intercourse. They go
different ways, and there is no appearance, until the end of nine
months, that they have ever been known to one another. Why should he
help her after her delivery? Why assist to bring up a child whom he
cannot instinctively know belongs to him alone?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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